Search

A year. It’s been a year. A year since I blogged. A year since we made the decisions about who would be admitted to the first class of the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy. Almost a year since the 2014/2015 school year started. And it’s been a month since we completed our first year. Where the heck does the time go?…

It’s been an eventful year, that’s for sure. One in which we learned a lot. And I mean a lot…

In a sense, the words “be careful what you wish for” apply perfectly. Bottom line? I decided to take a hiatus from game development because I was looking for some new and different challenges. I’ve certainly gotten them!

So what sort of challenges did we face in creating a brand new game development program?

The first challenge was simply figuring out what the DSGA should be all about. I didn’t see much point in simply duplicating what other game development programs do. Plenty of colleges and universities do a fine job of teaching people the nuts and bolts of making games. Trying to compete with such well-established programs seemed likely to end up in us getting crushed. The DSGA needed a unique focus.

The second challenge was finding the right people to teach leadership skills. I could have looked for faculty members with a ton of teaching experience as the number one qualification, but I knew what I really needed was people with real, hands-on (and recent) game development and/or studio management experience. Needless to say, it wasn’t easy finding people with those qualifications who were at a point in their lives where they were ready to give back to an industry that had done so much for them. I had to lure some people away from development and convince them that academia offered satisfactions they couldn’t find any other way.

The third challenge was finding students. We had a brand new, untested program and we needed to, first, get the word out and, second, convince people to give our fledgling program a shot.

Finally, from a pool of potential candidates we had to identify the 20 best and brightest from among our applicants. We needed young developers with aspirations and raw aptitude to lead.

With a little luck and a lot of hard work, all of those challenges were overcome. To be honest, things went even better than I hoped they would.